July at Metrograph
JULY AT METROGRAPH
pioneers of queer cinema
opens july 1
A rich and multi-faceted celebration of the groundbreaking contribution to American cinema made by visionary queer artists, Pioneers of Queer Cinema resurrects some now little-known and under-seen queer films and moving images documenting the LGBTQ+ community, and puts them in conversation with a number of landmark works—the latter group ranging from Kenneth Anger’s delirious homoerotic dreamscape Fireworks (1947) to some of the audacious ’90s fare that made up the movement film scholar and historian B. Ruby Rich dubbed “New Queer Cinema” in 1992. Films that offer often radical explorations of sexual orientation and gender identity, brimming with heartache, humor, and lust!
Presented in partnership with UCLA Film & Television Archive.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Desert Hearts - Paris Is Burning - Mala Noche
Nitrate Kisses + Firework + Seascape + At Least You Know You Exist
My Hustler + Jerovi + Confessions - Hide and Seek + Blue Diary + Testament
Parting Glances + Behind Every Good Man - The Times of Harvey Milk + Changes + Coming Out
Tongues Untied - Coming Out Under Fire - The Watermelon Woman + A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives + Trevor - Dottie Gets Spanked + Always on Sunday + Tricia’s Wedding
The Living End + Oblivion + If Every Girl Had a Diary - Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend + Choosing Children
MURINA
OPENS JULY 8
On a remote island off Croatia’s Adriatic coast, tensions escalate between restless, independent-minded 17-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipović, in a star-making turn) and her domineering father, Ante, when the arrival of a wealthy family friend, Javier, threatens to re-open old wounds. As Ante haggles over a life-changing deal with Javier, Julija finds herself drawn towards her globe-trotting visitor, who offers her a glimpse of liberation—as well as a taste of desire and violence. The lush Mediterranean setting, as masterfully shot by cinematographer Hélène Louvart (The Lost Daughter, Happy as Lazzaro), acquires a sinister beauty in this piercing coming-of-age drama, executive produced by Martin Scorsese.
watch the trailer
the paris review presents
paris blues
JUly 10
ROAD TRIP
july 1 through august
This summer you can hit the open road without ever leaving NYC (or getting gouged on gas) by getting in on Metrograph’s Road Trip, a retrospective series that charts a course through the lower 48 states, taking in the locally shot cinematic attractions as it goes. American cinema too often seems to give the impression that the country is comprised of nothing but New York and Los Angeles, but the U.S.A. is a mighty big place, and our Road Trip aims to see just about all of it, both city and countryside, including some rollicking detours taken Up Highway One, into the creepy hinterlands of Regional Horror, and exploring Frederick Wiseman's documentaries across the country. Buckle up, cinema tourists—we’ve got a long ride ahead.
the journey begins in the northeast and down into the south with JULY TITLES INCLUDing:
The King of Marvin Gardens - Homebodies - Spookies
The Friends of Eddie Coyle - Blow Out - Deadbeat at Dawn
Central Park - Belfast, Maine - The Dion Brothers (aka The Gravy Train)
Pecker - Wild River - Eyes of Fire - Grizzly
Mickey One - Candyman - Monrovia, Indiana - Holy Ghost People
Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things - The Town That Dreaded Sundown
Nashville - Mississippi Masala - Always for Pleasure
playtime: bicycles & balloons
weekends throughout july
Why bicycles and balloons? Well, both are gentler, more leisurely modes of transport that recall a road not taken in this hurried world of the automobile and the jet engine, and both suggest a lightness and buoyancy and free-floating liberation that’s rarely experienced when traveling chartered courses in boxes of steel and fiberglass. More crucial to our considerations, they’re both at the center of some very lovely films, movies that deal with the pleasures of unconfined movement, as well as the agony of having that emancipation curtailed. A few obvious kinships can be found in this series (The Wizard of Oz and Up), a few perhaps less so (Bicycle Thieves and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure), and throughout it remains a model of truth-in-advertising: there are a lot of bicycles and balloons here.
FAMILY MATINEES
SATURDAYs AND SUNDAYs AT NOON INCLUDING:
Up - Wadjda
Jour De Fête - Bicycle Thieves
The Wizard of Oz - The Kid With a Bike
Pee Wee's Big Adventure - The Triplets of Belleville
LATE NITES: MIAMI HEAT
JULY 1 THROUGH AUGUST
Calling all mojito fiends! Metrograph’s summer Road Trip is criss-crossing the whole of the continental USA, but we’re spending a little extra time down in the city of sun, sand, and fun that happens to be the backdrop to a helluva lot of superb pop cinema. Extend your beach hours into the night, or enjoy the heat and air conditioning at the same time with this selection of movies from the Magic City.
LATE NITE SCREENINGS INCLUDING:
Get Shorty - Miami Blues
True Lies - Miami Connection
The Mean Season - 2 Fast 2 Furious
Married to the Mob - Bad Boys - Scarface
Wild Things - The Funhouse - Miami Vice
WELCOME TO METROGRAPH A - Z
OPENS JULY 15
When Metrograph opened its doors in 2016, we did so with Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z, a way to introduce moviegoers to our particular take on cinema history. Every four months, a new programmer will create their own idiosyncratic alphabet: one film per letter, neither canon nor anti-canon, but rather a selection of favorite films that serve as life-changing revelations or enduring personal passions, and ultimately films of which Metrograph exists to spread the gospel. Starting this summer, Programmer Lydia Ogwang takes us from A-M, including stops at Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess.
SERIES includes:
Accident
Buffalo '66 - Close Up
Devil in a Blue Dress - Everyone Else
A Face In The Crowd - Ganja & Hess
The Headless Woman - I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Jane B. Par Agnés V. - The Killing
Let There Be Light - The Makioka Sisters
ANATOMY OF THE DEVIL: WALERIAN BOROWCZYK
OPENS JULY 23
“A fantastic filmmaker in the true sense of the word, Walerian Borowczyk was the Méliès of surrealism, a Freudian curator of fetish objects and patron saint of all things perverted. Harking back to interwar avant-garde while anticipating today’s artist-turned-directors, Borowczyk for three decades carved out a niche for himself in the uncharted space between fine art, arthouse and grindhouse. This series, organized around the short stories and illustrations collected in Anatomy of the Devil (the first stand-alone publication of Borowczyk’s fiction in English translation), reveals the Franco-Polish alchemist of the erotic at his most imaginative.”—Daniel Bird, series curator
SERIES INCLUDES:
Story of Sin - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Ms. Osborne
& More
ALFREDA'S CINEMA presents god is with you
ONE NIGHT ONLY - JULY 24
Alfreda’s Cinema presents God is with you, a portal into Afro-spirituality through poetic cinema.
“Spirituality finds us when we’re feeling lost. To heal, and be healed, we must free our minds from deception. These five films feature representations of Ifa, Hoodoo, Afro-Hinduism, and Afro-Catholicism, all encoded with Yoruba rituals and ancestral worship, as the filmmakers capture their subjects surrendering to the divine self in the celestial realm. An expression of truth in spiritual warfare, God is with you is a vessel to an ever-changing part of life. ”—Melissa Lyde, curator
Featuring: Ebbò by Yelaine Rodriguez, The Diary of an African Nun by Julie Dash, Alice Coltrane: Black Journal by St. Claire Bourne, Pilgrim by Cauleen Smith, and Maman Brigitte by Ayanna Dozier.
Followed by a Q&A with Dr. Ayanna Dozier.
MADE IN HONG KONG
OPENS JULY 22
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Fruit Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The result is a tough, pessimistic film, a portrait of a city on the brink that follows the drifting of high-school dropout and wannabe Triad tough Autumn Moon (Sam Lee, in a star-making role, opposite a largely nonprofessional cast), who sees little hope for his future or that of his home as a newly created Special Administrative Region within China. A raw, groundbreaking drama and portrait of nihilistic youth in the same vein as Rebel Without a Cause, My Own Private Idaho, and The Doom Generation, the film poses questions that remain burningly relevant as tumult engulfs Hong Kong.
A Metrograph Pictures release
watch the trailer
streaming on demand for metrograph members
HONG KONG HEROES
opens JULY 29
In 1984, a deal was struck between Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China concerning a planned “Handover” of the Hong Kong colony—part of the British Empire since 1841, scheduled to become part of China come 1997. The people of Hong Kong had little say in the matter, just as they’d had little say in how things were run by the Brits, and few anticipated a better deal from Beijing under the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement promised in the post-unification period by their new landlords. But while muzzled by larger powers in matters of self-determination, little Hong Kong could always speak commandingly through its internationally beloved cinema. Hong Kong Heroes brings together films that, obliquely or directly, address the city’s anxious anticipation of ’97, and its further concerns emerging in the aftermath, showcasing pre-Handover works by Johnnie To, Handover-period films by Fruit Chan, and Chan Tze-woon’s innovative docufiction Blue Island, which links the city’s recent insurrections to its history of rebellion.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Little Cheung - The Heroic Trio - Executioners
BLUE ISLAND
opens JULY 29
Chan’s second feature uses elements of documentary and fictional reconstruction—including visions of the possible future—to describe the Hong Kong of today and tomorrow, a city that’s been wracked by protests against the fading of the autonomy promised by the “One Country, Two Systems” deal struck with its 1997 Handover to the People’s Republic of China. A sui generis, boots-on-the-ground portrait of the city and its disillusioned-but-unbowed people, in which contemporary student protestors recreate the struggles of another generation, including the citywide strikes of 1967, suggesting not only the cyclical nature of history but the long deferral of revolutionary change.
WATCH THE TRAILER
THE METROGRAPH PICTURES LIBRARY
STREAMING ON DEMAND
Watch the full scope of Metrograph Pictures - from our early releases like The Raft to groundbreaking hits like A Bigger Splash and Downtown 81, Possession, and The French.
On demand. At home. Any time.